Games Creatures Play

by Charlaine Harris

  Bo’s set on taking over the family monster-hunting business. I think he’s seen too many straight-to-DVD movies, which might be why he wears that floor-length leather coat. Sure, the coat has hiding places for all sorts of useful things, but I’d rather he dressed like me: steel-toed boots, jeans, flannel shirt, and a John Deere ball cap—you know, workingman’s clothes.

  Bo is reliable. He’s also crazy strong. The way that boy swings his silver baseball bat, sometimes a zombie head will fly so far you can’t see it land. When I can keep Bo’s mind focused, he’s the one I want at my side when the undead feces hits the magical oscillator.

  Everyone in the family carries something silver. I prefer to ’vaporate the supernatch at a distance, but more often than not in the stompin’ business things come down to up-close and in-person fisticuffs: for that, you need silver. My daughter, Sunshine—she’s my baby, I tell ya—loves her bow and her throwing knives, while my younger son, Luke, has his prized short sword. My wife, Betty Lou, doesn’t like to ding up her nails, so she carries a purse full of charmed-up costume jewelry.

  Me? I’ve got my rhinestone-studded silver knuckles. I call ’em “Old Glory.”

  Betty Lou, Luke, and Sunshine were all out in the station wagon. That chapped Luke’s ass. At fourteen years old, he’s a skinny little fella that takes more after his ma than his pa. Sometimes he gets to face off against the undead, but only when I’ve already scouted the situation to ensure it’s no more than a minor threat. Trouble is, Luke knows when I do that. It always makes him surly and disrespectful. I try to be patient with him, on account of he’s only fourteen and I pretty much acted the same way when I was his age.

  The Safeway had been haunted for years, we’d been told. Every early April, customers and staff would report weird sensations, the feeling of being watched, of not being alone. By mid-April, some customers would leave the store for good, complaining of fruit moving by itself or someone whispering in their ear: general spooky stuff that’s bad for business. By the end of the month, physical manifestations would kick in: late-night damage to equipment and inventory, and—on more than one occasion—night workers were actually hurt by broken glass, unexplained burns, or falling racks. For three straight years, it had gotten so bad that late-night stock people who worked the night of April 24 promptly phoned in their resignation on the morning of April 25. The morning of the twenty-fifth, everything seemed to be fine for the next eleven months, but management still had to hire an all-new late-night shift.

  Well, the store’s owners had had enough; they wanted the ghosts gone.

  I thumbed the button on the box attached to my belt. There was more money for us in San Francisco than we had back in Kentucky, including a nice equipment allocation. We’d used the funds to get fancy headsets that wrap around your ear and have a microphone built in. The headsets let us stay in constant contact with each other. “Luke, you there?” I said.

  His puberty-cracking voice came back right away, so loud I winced. “Pa, you need me to come in? I’m ready to go!”

  The headset volume was too damn high. Each word felt like a nail in my eardrum. I fumbled with the box but couldn’t figure out how to turn it down.

  Bo ducked back around the corner, reached out to the box, and spun a dial that I hadn’t seen. The volume dropped down to normal. Kids know this electronic stuff like they know how to breathe.

  “No, Luke,” I said. “I don’t need you to come in.”

  “But, Pa, you—”

  “Son, right now your role is research, and if things get bad in here you’re my backup. I need you and your sister out there in case things get dicey.”

  That was half true. We always operate with a backup element. You never know when the supernatch are going to surprise you, when one reported zombie turns out to be a horde, when a sighting of a single harpy turns out to be a bloodthirsty flock. Having backup can be the difference between living and dying. Bo and I needed backup, that part was true—the untrue part was that our real backup wasn’t Luke, it was his mother.

  He answered me in that single word that every parent loves to hear from children.

  “Whatever, Pa.”

  I needed to get Luke positive about something, make him feel useful and needed.

  “Son, you looked this place up on Giggle, right? You said the Safeway used to be the site of a baseball stadium for the Giants?”

  He made a sigh so heavy I would have heard it even without the headset. He always let me know how disappointed he was, but he also always does his part, and that’s research. He’s got a laptop that he can connect to the Internet even while out in the station wagon. I don’t know how the damn thing works. Hell, he even has a little portable printer he brings with him.

  “It’s Google, Pa, not Giggle,” he said. “Not for the Giants, for a minor league team called the San Francisco Seals. The stadium was built in 1931. The Seals moved to Phoenix in 1957, and they knocked the stadium down two years later. A department store stood here from the late sixties to the midseventies. The building was a bunch of car dealerships in the eighties. In the nineties, they converted it to a shopping center.”

  A lot of history at this address. The ghosts could have come from any point during that timeline, even before it, possibly. Ghosties tend to lock onto a place due to some kind of violence or tragedy. They stick close to the place where they died, oftentimes not even really being aware that they are dead at all. Vamps, demons, lycanthropes, wizards, ghouls, all of them tend to know where they are, who they are, and what’s going on around them. Ghosts, on the other hand, are the short-bus riders of the undead.

  “That’s helpful,” I said. “What about stories on murders and suicides at this address? You find those like I asked you?”

  “You didn’t ask,” Luke said. “You didn’t say find those stories, Pa, you said I should think about finding those stories.”

  The insolence in his tone. Boy wanted to play word games with me, and at a time like this? Rebellion has its time and place in a young man’s heart, but that time isn’t when we’re facing the supernatch. He should have had that information ready for me.

  “Luke, you little—”

  I heard a clonk and a surprised cry of pain from Luke, followed by a long “Aw, mawww!”

  I knew that sound all too well. When the kids got out of line, my wife was fond of a whack on the noggin. She wears a lot of heavy rings. They hurt when they hit the back of your head. I ain’t too proud to say I know that pain firsthand.

  “Betty Lou, you there?”

  “I am, Sugar,” said the love of my life. “I’ll get your smart-ass son to work on those stories. And until then, he can think about what will happen when we get home . . .”

  Her voice trailed off with the implied threat. I wouldn’t want to be in Luke’s shoes when this mission was over, I’ll tell you that for free. She sounded mad as hell. She also sounded worried, and a little bit . . . sad. “Hunter, you okay in there?”

  “Right as rain,” I said. “We have eyes on one, ain’t seen the other as of yet. You picking up any vibes?”

  Among her many talents, my wife is an empath. She can feel sensations that others can’t. More often than not, she picks up on the energy of an area and has visions related to both what happened and what’s about to happen. She’s not a precog, exactly, but she has a knack for figuring out what the important things are in a case even if she doesn’t know why those things are important.

  “Nothing specific,” she said. “There’s a lot of heartbreak there, Hunter. I can’t put my finger on it, but something awful and tragic happened.”

  “How long ago?”

  She paused, thinking. “Can’t say for sure. There was love, then anguish so deep I can barely hold it back. I think . . . I think it’s how I might feel if I lost you.”

  That was bad news. That could mean the ghosts came from a spat gone
wrong, a love triangle, coveting another’s girl or beau . . . something along those lines. That always made for a difficult situation. Just like with cops and the living, when it came to the supernatch it was the domestic violence cases that could suddenly spin out of control.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Sunshine okay?”

  “As always,” Betty Lou said. “We’re here if you need us.”

  “Thank you, Sugar.”

  Sunshine is a nice girl. Maybe because she’s thirteen. Betty Lou warns me that could change real soon, that my baby girl might fashion a bout of rebellion that would put Luke’s to shame.

  But when that happens, Betty Lou assured me she’ll walk me through it. I know how to discipline boys. My baby girl? Not so much.

  “Hunter,” Betty Lou said, “I’m feeling . . . something to do with sports. What’s the ghost wearing?”

  I hadn’t thought to look that closely at the ghost’s fashion sense.

  I pulled Bo back, then leaned out past the end cap so I could get a real eyeful of that floating half torso. It was hard to make out, but once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it.

  “Well, I’ll be,” I said. “Tell Luke to focus his search on the history of the stadium.”

  The ghost was wearing an old-timey baseball jersey, complete with pinstripes.

  • • •

  “Luke,” I said, “you find anything yet?”

  Luke prefaced his answer with yet another heavy sigh.

  “There was a murder-suicide in 1933,” he said. “That’s two years after they built the stadium, Joe DiMaggio’s second year with the Seals.”

  Joe DiMaggio? Next to Babe Ruth, DiMaggio was probably the biggest name in baseball history.

  “Joltin’ Joe played for the San Francisco Seals?”

  “Thirty-two to thirty-three,” Luke said. “The murder-suicide story doesn’t mention him, though. It happened in the locker room, between halves of a doubleheader between the Seals and the Portland Beavers. Story says that John ‘The Cannon’ Carlisle, a pitcher, shot and killed Francis Haupberg, a backup catcher, then turned the gun on himself.”

  That was certainly reason enough for a haunting. Maybe the two ghosts came back around the anniversary of their deaths and fought it out, year after year.

  “Pa, looks like the Yankees wanted both DiMaggio and Carlisle,” Luke said. “The Seals were asking a hundred thousand dollars each, which in today’s terms”—I heard his fingers clacking away on his laptop keyboard—“would be one-point-eight million, each.”

  Over three and a half million for two minor league players. I don’t know how baseball worked back then, but that’s a sizable chunk of money; money has a way of making people do evil things.

  “DiMaggio was worth that,” I said. “That what the Yankees paid?”

  “No, he got hurt,” Luke said. “Blew out his knee before the deal happened. The Seals wound up getting twenty-five thousand for him, and nothing for Carlisle, obviously. The murder-suicide happened after DiMaggio’s injury, but before DiMaggio went to the Yanks.”

  That must have been a helluva blow to the Seals organization. They wound up getting an eighth of what they’d hoped for.

  “What about Haupberg, the catcher?” I said. “Was he a prospect for the majors?”

  The heavy sigh again. “Pa, I told you he was a backup. Ain’t you listening?”

  I heard the sharp smack of a ring-clad hand hitting the back of a head, then Luke’s hiss of annoyed pain.

  “Sorry, Pa,” Luke said in a voice that made it clear he wasn’t sorry at all. “Francis Haupberg is barely mentioned in the story, other than that he was best buddies with Carlisle.”

  “So why did Carlisle kill him?”

  “The story says Haupberg might have been having an affair with Carlisle’s girlfriend.”

  Men had killed for far less. I mean, if someone made time with my Betty Lou? Well, I couldn’t rightly hurt her, no matter what she did, but the man that laid hands on her? I’d be hard-pressed not to let my rage take form.

  Something else about the story bothered me.

  “What was the date of that game?”

  “April twenty-fourth,” Luke said.

  The same day every year when the worst of the haunting went down—today was April 24.

  “Interesting,” I said. “It’s the eightieth anniversary of that incident.”

  “You’re a regular math whiz, Pa.”

  Smack.

  “Aw, Mawww,” Luke said. “Sorry, Pa.”

  I heard Betty Lou’s voice: “Not as sorry as you’ll be when we get home. Tell your father the rest.”

  I knew the heavy sigh was coming before Luke did it, and he didn’t disappoint.

  “There was another death a week after the murder-suicide,” he said. “A man named Louis Lima hung himself with a rope made of gym towels, right in the same locker room where they found Carlisle and Haupberg.”

  If the Safeway spooks were, indeed, Carlisle and Haupberg, and their ghosts had been involved with the death of Louis Lima, it meant I could be dealing with ghosts that were willing to kill mortals. Bad news.

  “Hunter,” Betty Lou said, “this story fits with the emotions I’m feeling from the place. Hurt, anger, betrayal . . . there’s some tortured souls in there.”

  Tortured souls, and a high level of paranormal activity happening on the anniversary of a murder-suicide. Ghosts have a thing for anniversaries; it’s like they’re stuck in a tape loop that plays out on a calendar basis. I’ve heard tell it’s got something to do with lunar cycles and the Earth’s rotation and whatnot, but I’m a stomper, not a scientist.

  “John Carlisle and Francis Haupberg,” I said. “Those are our ghosts. Now we just have to figure out how to send them on their way.”

  • • •

  The second ghost showed up five minutes later, a legless half torso floating in a cloud of bubbling green vapor. Its pinstriped jersey matched that of Ghost Number One, but Ghost Number Two also wore a catcher’s chest protector and a catcher’s mask. Behind the mask, two glowing, yellow dots amid a sea of deepest black.

  Bo tugged at my sleeve.

  “Pa, should we take ’em now?”

  “Hell no,” I said. “We watch for a little bit.”

  Ghosts are creatures of habit. Maybe programming is a better word for it. They’ll do the same things over and over, especially ones that operate at a particular time of day or day of the year. Don’t get in their way and they’ll probably never know you’re there. Of course, getting in their way was our job. That would come soon enough. I needed to gauge their power before I started a tangle.

  The catcher floated down the store’s long, horizontal end aisle to the rear corner and stopped in front of the frozen seafood freezer. Inside the sliding glass doors were bags of shrimp, fish, scallops, and other goodies. The catcher turned his back to the door and faced down the length of the aisle. He lowered. The tile floor in front of him vibrated, shifted . . . a glowing home plate appeared, perfectly square in the front, rear point pointed back to the freezer.

  The legless, glowing pitcher moved to the center of the end aisle, stopping in front of the butcher’s counter. Something told me he was sixty feet, six inches away from the catcher. The pitcher wore a battered baseball glove on his right hand, which meant he was a lefty.

  A softly glowing mound rose up from the floor below him. The mist below his waist formed into legs. He settled down on the mound, leaned forward, and stared at the catcher.

  The catcher’s legs appeared as well. He squatted on his heels, slammed a not-there fist into a not-there glove three times, then raised the glove and opened it. His free hand slid down to his crotch, where he flashed two fingers pointing down: the signal that said the pitcher was supposed to throw a curveball.

  The pitcher ghost shook his head: he didn’t want to
throw a curve. He wanted another kind of pitch.

  “Pa,” Bo said, as urgent as if he were the first man to discover that the world was round, “that catcher is giving the pitcher signals!”

  I sighed. It’s a wonder that I was able to tie my shoes all by myself before my kids came along. Back in Slayerville, Bo had been a star of his high school baseball team (and basketball team, and football team, not that I keep track of such things). Kids his age think they invented sports—I might have played an inning or two in my day.

  The catcher pointed three fingers down: the standard signal to throw a slider. Again, the pitcher shook him off.

  “Pa,” Bo said, “the pitcher wants to throw the heater.”

  The heater: a fastball. The signal for a fastball is usually one finger pointed down.

  A fastball is a pitcher’s testosterone-laden equivalent of two cavemen squaring off with clubs. It’s as macho as macho gets. No curves, no dips, just pure speed: it says, I can throw the ball faster than you can hit it. But, because it’s a straight pitch, it’s also the easiest to hit—if the batter can recognize it and bring the bat around fast enough to connect. If a pitcher really wants to make a batter look bad, they throw the heater.

  The catcher pointed one finger down.

  The pitcher nodded, then stood tall. He looked behind him, maybe to make sure some imaginary runner from eighty years ago stayed on second, then again faced the catcher, right shoulder pointed forward, left shoulder back, chin close to right shoulder and staring down home plate.

  If the real-life pitcher had possessed even a tenth of the grace this ghost showed, he must have been something to behold. The pitcher’s right knee came up to his chest as he turned away slightly and brought his glove up to his left ear. The right leg kicked out, kicked out long, reaching all the way to the front of the mound. His left hand cocked back. Then his shoulders torqued around and the ball shot forward with a crackle of eldritch energy.